Tim Bray, whose name appears on both the JSON and XML specifications, reflects on the state of both formats in 2026. JSON turns 25 and is effectively frozen — RFC 8259 won't be superseded, known irritants like lack of comments and date/time literals will never be fixed, but it's ubiquitous and good enough. XML, once controversial for proving platform-independent data interchange and Unicode adoption were viable, is now largely relegated to office document formats, humanities computing, legislative data, EPUB, and a few niche domains. Both formats have reached a stable, low-maintenance phase where developers rarely need to think about them.
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